North Texas woman who played role in horrific abuse pleads guilty in adoption scam Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/

A Texas woman who was a program manager at an adoption agency based in Ohio has pleaded guilty to federal charges of procuring adoptions of Ugandan and Polish children by bribing Ugandan officials and defrauding authorities in this country. Debra Parris of Lake Dallas also played a role in one of the most horrific child abuse cases in North Texas, where the woman’s adult son used a Barbie doll to cause severe trauma to the private parts of his 5-year-old adopted daughter, authorities said. The girl was adopted from the agency where the North Texas woman worked. Parris pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to violate the foreign corrupt practices act (FCPA) and commit visa fraud in connection with the Uganda scheme, and conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with the Poland scheme. She is scheduled to be sentenced on March 9, 2022. Two other co-defendants, Margaret Cole, 73, of Strongsville, Ohio; and Dorah Mirembe, 41, of Kampala, Uganda, were indicted in the case. Cole was the executive director of European Adoption Consultants, and Mirembe worked for the company.

The trial against Cole is scheduled to commence on Feb. 7. Mirembe remains at large. Another North Texas woman and an employee at European Adoption Consultants, Robin Longoria of Mansfield, has pleaded guilty in the case. Information was not available Friday on her status. They were charged in Ohio, where the now closed European Adoption Consultants had been operating. The company was based in Strongsville, Ohio. The State Department said that in addition to Poland and Uganda, the agency ran adoption programs in Bulgaria, China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Honduras, India, Panama, Tanzania and Ukraine, according to cleveland.com. Parris engaged in a scam to pay bribes to Ugandan officials to corruptly procure the adoption of Ugandan children by families in the United States, including the adoption of kids who were not properly determined to be orphaned, authorities said.

The bribes were paid to social welfare officers, Ugandan magistrate judges and court registrars. According to an indictment, Parris and other co-conspirators and the entities they worked for received more than $900,000 in connection with the adoptions. In the Poland scheme, the indictment alleges that after clients of their adoption agency determined they could not care for one of two Polish children they were set to adopt, Cole and Parris took steps to transfer the child to Parris’ relatives, who were not eligible for inter-country adoption. The girl was adopted in 2015 to John Tufts, who is Parris’ son and lived in North Texas. The Dallas Observer reported the girl told investigators that a bad guy “hurt my vagina and booty and they make it red” but she refused to identify him, according to Tufts’ arrest warrant affidavit. Tufts was charged in Denton with injury to a child — serious bodily injury, a second-degree felony. According to the affidavit, he “intentionally and knowingly caused injury to [the child] by inserting a Barbie doll into her vaginal and anal area.” Tufts’ wife was also charged. John Tufts was sentenced to 28 years in prison in March 2019, according to Denton County criminal court records. In July 2019, his now ex-wife, Georgiana Tufts, was sentenced to 10 years of probation with 90 days in jail and 240 community service hours as conditions of that probation, according to court records. After the girl was abused, the Ohio federal indictment alleges that Cole and Parris took steps to conceal their improper conduct from U.S. agencies and Polish authorities.